Excuse Me, Is This Thing On?

May 10, 2015

Ahem. I haven’t been seen around these parts in a while. For good reasons.

The last year has been one of tremendous change, which culminated in December 2014 with my accepting an offer to become the director of a medical library and biomedical communications shop very close to where I grew up, in east Tennessee just west of the Appalachian mountains.

It’s been a great and wonderful change, but the road to get here was extremely stressful. We had to sell a house, and quickly. We had to find a new place to rent that would allow us to keep our three cats and hundred-pound dog, without really being able to visit to look at places. We packed the entire house in Nashville while sick as dogs with the flu. We unloaded (just two of us) the entire 20+ foot moving truck in the rain, then turned around and drove back to Nashville to do the closing on the house. Then we packed a rental van with the last of the stray belongings and headed back east, and I started the new job just a day later.

There was definitely some crying in my underwear with a bottle of wine during the process.

The new position and new town have presented their own challenges. I resigned from the Our Bodies Ourselves work because I was sure I couldn’t juggle all of this newness while doing a good job for them. I hunkered down, learned the new people and place, and am finally starting to feel like I’m on my feet.

So of course I think I want to write again.

But the thing is, I don’t want to do it here. The world has changed while I’ve been taking a break (I am still bummed about Google Reader…), and I want to write and share information in different ways than I did a decade ago. I briefly experimented with making a “women’s health news” tumblr, but I no longer want to limit my writing to that one specific topic area. So that one’s gone, replaced by a more general site where I can address all of the topics that interest me.

The new, new place is at http://rachelrwalden.tumblr.com/ . This WordPress site will stay up as an archive – there’s a lot of content here I’m proud of, and personal items I don’t want to lose, like posts about my dear, departed cats (yeah, I’m a librarian cat lady, get over it). If you’re still interested in what I have to say about reproductive rights, but also interested in other healthcare, librarian, and social justice topics, please come on over. Here’s the introductory post: Wait, Why Am I Here?